Wired: ‘Perplexity Is a Bullshit Machine’
Dhruv Mehrotra and Tim Marchman, reporting for Wired (News+ link):
A Wired analysis and one carried out by developer Robb Knight
suggest that Perplexity is able to achieve this partly through
apparently ignoring a widely accepted web standard known as the
Robots Exclusion Protocol to surreptitiously scrape areas of
websites that operators do not want accessed by bots, despite
claiming that it won’t. Wired observed a machine tied to
Perplexity — more specifically, one on an Amazon server and
almost certainly operated by Perplexity — doing this on wired.com
and across other Condé Nast publications.
The Wired analysis also demonstrates that despite claims that
Perplexity’s tools provide “instant, reliable answers to any
question with complete sources and citations included,” doing away
with the need to “click on different links,” its chatbot, which is
capable of accurately summarizing journalistic work with
appropriate credit, is also prone to bullshitting, in the
technical sense of the word.
This paints Perplexity as, effectively, an IP theft engine, and its CEO, Aravind Srinivas, as a degenerate liar. None of this is an oversight or just playing fast and loose. It’s a scheme to deliberately circumvent the plain intention of website owners not to have Perplexity index their sites. Liars and thieves. Utterly shameless.
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Dhruv Mehrotra and Tim Marchman, reporting for Wired (News+ link):
A Wired analysis and one carried out by developer Robb Knight
suggest that Perplexity is able to achieve this partly through
apparently ignoring a widely accepted web standard known as the
Robots Exclusion Protocol to surreptitiously scrape areas of
websites that operators do not want accessed by bots, despite
claiming that it won’t. Wired observed a machine tied to
Perplexity — more specifically, one on an Amazon server and
almost certainly operated by Perplexity — doing this on wired.com
and across other Condé Nast publications.
The Wired analysis also demonstrates that despite claims that
Perplexity’s tools provide “instant, reliable answers to any
question with complete sources and citations included,” doing away
with the need to “click on different links,” its chatbot, which is
capable of accurately summarizing journalistic work with
appropriate credit, is also prone to bullshitting, in the
technical sense of the word.
This paints Perplexity as, effectively, an IP theft engine, and its CEO, Aravind Srinivas, as a degenerate liar. None of this is an oversight or just playing fast and loose. It’s a scheme to deliberately circumvent the plain intention of website owners not to have Perplexity index their sites. Liars and thieves. Utterly shameless.